Lives in Cricket No 37 - William Clarke

5 Introduction Since Waterloo only two men have single-handedly changed the face of the known cricket world. The more recent is Kerry Packer, to whom we owe the majority of the innovations made since he set up his World Series Cricket. His predecessor is William Clarke, the subject of this present biography. Clarke’s activities, as they will be described in the chapters which follow, have to be set against the wider background of change taking place in English society. The old ‘aristocratic’ England was gradually becoming a more commercial and capitalist country; the great Reform Act of 1832 and the Municipal Corporations Act of 1845 took powers away from the gentry and placed them in the hands of a more commercial-minded class. Clarke’s own commercial creation, the All-England Eleven, temporarily at least, led the cricket world and eclipsed the exclusive clubs of the south as well as the various ephemeral sides, some based on counties, supported by the gentry. The transformation of the British economy, as industry became more important and agriculture (and hence rural life) declined, meant that more and more people moved to the towns and cities, where their numbers started to contribute to attendances at mass spectator sports. Interest declined in traditional rural sports, some ‘boisterous, drunken and licentious’, mostly free to spectators and often taking place on the many public holidays. Encouraged by churches and by secular groups, more respectable, ‘rational’ sports, the principal one in the 1830-1850 period being cricket, grew in popularity. Attendances grew, with many of the new, paying spectators coming from the skilled working and middle classes, after the income of those groups rose in real terms from 1822 onwards. Some publicans, like Clarke, turned away from supporting the traditional ways and readily shifted to newer forms of entertainment. The railways, important for distributing goods and coal, started to carry participants and spectators to both the new and old cricketing venues. Rowland Hill’s Penny Post made it easier for entrepreneurs to set up new events and fixtures and loosened reliance on the traditional holiday entertainments. In so far as Clarke is remembered today, it is as founder of the Trent Bridge Cricket Ground, but its survival, when all the other pre-1850 northern ‘professional’ cricket grounds have faded away, is more due to the freehold owners, the Musters family, than any desire or influence on Clarke’s part. Clarke quit Trent Bridge and Nottingham in the spring of 1846 for a probable combination of reasons: his marriage broke down; seemingly there was little financial return from Trent Bridge as a sports ground, which at the time was well outside the town of Nottingham; and third, possibly